A protester covers his mouth with a sticker bearing the name of the Hungary's ruling party, Fidesz, to protest the new constitution. A new Human Rights Watch report raises concerns about the constitution.

Hungary’s three-year-old government is clamping down on media freedom, undermining human rights protections, and giving itself far more power through a new constitution, a human rights group says.

In a report released Thursday that examines how Hungary’s ruling Fidesz party is governing the economically depressed, Central European country, Human Rights Watch says Hungary has forced as many as 300 judges into early retirement since January 2012, pressuring the country’s remaining judges to fall into line with Fidesz ideology.

Hungary has also created a media regulator headed by a political appointee with close ties to the government, a development that media companies say has led to self-censorship.

While Roma say they face widespread persecution in Hungary, the Canadian government disagrees. It charges that Roma typically come to Canada to take advantage of generous social welfare programs, not to flee from danger.

Hungary was among the countries that Canada included on a so-called “safe list” in December. The list makes it more difficult for asylum seekers from those countries to win refugee status in Canada.

In February, Canada’s citizenship ministry called the list a success, pointing out that asylum claims from Hungary, Canada’s top source country for claimants in 2011 and 2012, had dropped 98 per cent compared to the average between 2009 and 2012.

It’s not immediately clear whether the HRW report, which relies on first-hand interviews with human-rights activists, minority groups and local journalists, could be used by Canadian immigration lawyers to support their clients’ charges of persecution in Hungary.

HRW, a non-governmental group based in New York that monitors abuses around the world, also says Hungary’s new constitution contains provisions that discriminate against LGBT people, limit women’s rights and restrict voting rights for people with “limited mental capacity.”

The country is also limiting religious freedoms, HRW said, alleging that in 2012 it documented cases where religious groups involved in social work largely financed by state subsidies — including a branch of the Methodist Church and the Dzsaj Bhim Buddhist congregation — were stripped of their status as denominations, a measure that severely harms their ability to continue social work for the homeless and the low-income Roma minority.

HRW also documented how the Hungarian government has cracked down on homelessness, making repeat offenders liable to imprisonment, a fine or both. More than 2,000 people were convicted under the law in 2012.

Hungary’s constitutional court struck down the law in November. Then in March, the government built into the constitution a provision permitting the criminalization of homelessness, preventing future constitutional court review.

Laszlo Pordany, Hungary’s ambassador to Canada, said in an interview that Human Rights Watch and other critics are either misinformed or politically motivated in their criticism of his country.

“Some information which is political in the first place, gets distorted,” Pordany said.

For instance, Pordany said Hungary does not have a federal law that seeks to prosecute the homeless. Rather, the constitution was changed to allow local governments to decide how to handle homelessness issues.

“Some have homes and entice the homeless in for free,” he said. “Some homeless are being talked into accepting. It’s a long process.”

“It’s a free press except for one thing and that’s hate speech,” he said. “We do not tolerate hate speech. If an anti-Semitic statement appears, it’s handled with zero tolerance, and absolutely the same with anti-Roma statements. But very seldom do they occur.”

Many Hungarians have rallied behind Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and his Fidesz party as the country’s economy spirals down.

Like many European countries, construction in Hungary is at record lows and mortgage lending has virtually vanished. The recession has fostered an atmosphere of “us versus them,” fuelling support of right-wing parties that blame Hungary’s Jewish and Roma communities for their country’s woes.

But Kristof Domina, director of the Athena Institute, a Budapest organization that documents hate crimes in Hungary, said HRW’s claims amount to generalizations and could “backfire” against Hungary.

“There is no crackdown on homeless and religious minorities, not to mention same-sex couples,” Domina wrote in an email. “The Hungarian government represents the view that a family is a man and a woman. It might not be very forward-looking to write this into a constitution as they did, but they have a legal supermajority in parliament so they can do so.

“Is this inclusive? No. Do I like it? No. Is this a crackdown? No way.”